Ruin Everything! is the album Q and Not U were supposed to make before they completely sissied out on us with Power. Part Dismemberment Plan, part Drive Like Jehu, with just a touch of Gang of Four and a good bit of math-rock blood in their veins, We Versus the Shark are something like a million-dollar-man of dancepunk. Sometimes thumping across a funked, pop landscape with a kickdrum, other times clattering across it with math-rock stutters, their greatest fault is that their songs sometimes suffer from a rattling lack of internal cohesion.

However, if you approach Ruin Everything! as a panorama of short set pieces, it has golden moments aplenty. "This Graceless Planet", firing an initial salvo of dual DLJ guitar blasts across the dance floor, veers into at least six separate movements without any apparent cohesion. Somehow it winds up in a rib-bustingly good dance punk finale that blows the Rapture through a discotheque wall, one guitar's chord emphasis undergirding the other's angular guitar stabs over a whiplash bass line.

"Slide" moves through multiple complex melodies, then crashes headfirst into chalky guitar punches and stumbles into an adorable organ-led melodic bridge. It builds brilliantly from those few impossibly disjointed bars into an ingenious, horn-accentuated set of guitar fireworks. We Versus the Shark are similarly strong when it comes to hooks; "I Am at the Mercy of an Ambulance Driver" nearly explodes with them, and opener "You Don't Have to Kick It" can't avoid them, splaying guitar-hooks and smart bass figures all over its schizophrenic canvas.

Inevitably, multiple personality disorder in a band's songwriting will result in problematic moments. "I Am Destined for Greatness" is almost Mars Volta-like in its movements from off-rhythms to gentle, atmospheric melodic noodlings, and from there into aggressive, Isis-like chord stabs. However, as with The Mars Volta, the ideas never develop into anything resembling forward momentum, and the song as a whole is woefully weak, despite the promise of its component parts. Indeed, in spite of the giddy pleasure to be had throughout Ruin Everything!, awkwardly stitched compositional seams show through; the chugging Blood Brothers hardcore romp "No Flint No Spark" simply can't and won't mesh with the group's pretty riffing.

It seems far more likely that We Versus the Shark's occasional surplus of ideas is a result of disorganized genius and kitchen-sink enthusiasm rather than lack of focus. For the most part, Ruin Everything! is ruinously fun and ingenious. In the ongoing contest to see who will outlive the waning dancepunk trend, We Versus the Shark look like one of the "alpha" bands.